1. Field of the Invention
Example aspects of the present invention generally relate to data communications and, more particularly, to systems, methods, apparatus and computer program products for providing packet-level forward error correction (FEC) with higher throughput using UDP (“User Datagram Protocol”).
2. Related Art
“Evolution Data Optimized” or “EV-DO” is a wireless radio broadband data standard adopted by many CDMA mobile phone service providers in countries such as the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Russia, Brazil, and Australia. It is standardized by the 3d Generation Partnership Project 2 (“3GPP2”), as part of the CDMA2000 family of standards. One aspect of these standards involves the use of UDP and/or Transmission Control Protocol (“TCP”) operating on top of Internet Protocol (“IP”).
Conventional data (e.g., content) delivery using one-way UDP on an EV-DO network allows for higher data transmission speeds than conventional two-way data delivery using TCP. However, UDP is typically not as reliable for downloading files as TCP. Unlike UDP, TCP uses a return link to acknowledge successful data receipt and if no acknowledgement is received it is assumed that a packet has been lost and the protocol causes that data packet to be resent.
UDP also does not efficiently use a network, such as an EV-DO network or the Internet, because when sending data, UDP does not monitor the available network bandwidth. In addition, network bandwidth availability may vary continuously. Therefore, the UDP transmitter is typically configured to deliver data on a network slowly enough so that it is not lost during periods of low bandwidth availability. Consequently, data may be delivered using UDP over the network at speeds well below the available bandwidth can handle, resulting in a decrease of throughout.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,012,159, 6,272,658, 6,336,200, 6,570,843 and 6,609,223, 7,024,609 and U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/233,440, filed on Sep. 22, 2005, 11/276,225, filed on Feb. 17, 2006, 11/516,197, filed Sep. 6, 2006, and 11/874,484, filed Oct. 18, 2007, each patent and application of which is incorporated herein by reference, describe methods for applying forward error correction (FEC) to protect streams of data from outages. These methods also allow a receiver to recover data which is lost because of such outages. The techniques described in the aforementioned patents and applications can be used, for example, together with industry standards such as the standards promulgated by 3GPP2 to provide reliable communications.